WATER FROM THE SEA: PRICELESS

“If this summer was not a wake-up call, as a nation, when you have 1,500-plus counties in drought. You back up a water truck onto one of those Missouri cornfields right now and ask them how much they would pay for the water. Priceless.”

Tom Wornham

Vice chairman

San Diego County Water Authority

In coming days, officials of the San Diego County Water Authority are expected to cross the T’s on a 500-page deal to buy water from the sea that has been desalted at a plant to be built by Poseidon Resources adjacent to the old Encina Power Station in Carlsbad.

If all goes as planned, when the plant opens in 2016 it will produce 50 million gallons of high-quality, drinkable water every day. It will be the largest and most technologically advanced desalination plant in the United States, giving San Diego national bragging rights and, far more important, giving this region a significant new source of local water.

But it will hardly be easy – or cheap.

To get the desalted water from the Poseidon plant into the water authority’s system, 10 miles of new 54-inch pipe must be laid underground across Carlsbad, and five miles of 50-year-old pipe leading to the Twin Oaks Valley Water Treatment Plant must be relined. The desalination plant, the pipelines and related improvements at the Twin Oaks plant will cost $900 million.

Pricing of the Poseidon water will be detailed in the water-purchase agreement now being finalized, but it is expected to range from $2,062 per acre-foot to $2,329 per acre-foot. (An acre-foot is 325,851 gallons, or enough to satisfy the water needs of two average families for a year.)

That is roughly twice the price CWA pays today for water from Northern California and the Colorado River provided by the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California. It is estimated that it would mean an additional cost to customers of $5 to $7 a month.

Is it worth it? Yes. In fact, in our view, it would be irresponsible not to move forward.

It is an apples-and-oranges fallacy to compare the projected price of Poseidon water with what the water authority pays today for MWD water. The valid comparison is with the price the water authority would have to pay for other alternative supplies. Desalination still comes in at the high end, but not by a lot. It must also be noted that the price of treated MWD water has doubled in the past 10 years, while the price of its untreated water has skyrocketed nearly 80 percent.

Then, of course, there is the intangible issue of how much is too much for a reliable supply of local water in a semiarid region where the population will rise above 3.5 million in 10 more years and that now imports 80 percent of its water from elsewhere – supplies that are continually threatened by an earthquake severing aqueducts or pipelines and by the political vagaries of all California counties competing for the same water.

An uncertain or unreliable supply of water is the greatest threat to San Diego County’s economic health and quality of life. Read Tom Wornham’s quote above again and you will agree: Reliable water is not only necessary, it is priceless.